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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23586070">brothers</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye'>rizahawkaye</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Brotherly Love, Brothers, Day drinking, Gen, Germany, In Your Feels, Social Commentary, eds a sad drinker, sad edo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:53:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,932</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23586070</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Edward is stuck in Munich, Germany while Alphonse is... What, exactly? [Edward is yearning bad for his brother.]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alphonse Elric &amp; Edward Elric, Edward Elric &amp; Alfons Heiderich</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>brothers</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>never have i ever written conqueror of shamballa fic before! this was incredibly fun. i really have a special place in my heart for fma 03</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Edward took the long way home. Beside the archways to the New Town Hall were dozens of people, all clad in olive green or brown homemade uniforms, their strange, twisted symbol a red stain on their arms. Ed was not interested in whatever was held in the New Town Hall, no matter how badly Maes Hughes wanted him to be. The men who waited outside its doors, bleeding into the walkway beneath the severe arches, had loud opinions, and Ed had heard enough of hate in Amestris to bow his ear to it in Munich too.</p><p>Ed didn't share in the country's bloated hatred of the Roma, nor did he understand their prejudices. He had come upon Roma once in a bar in Berlin Alfons had dragged him to, one where men wore women's clothes and women wore men's clothes, but nobody seemed uncomfortable in those choices. Ed had seen Roma there, drunk off the intensity of the night, off the freedom of Berlin. But the men who waited outside the New Town Hall, they hated the men who wore women's clothes and the women who wore men's clothes and the Roma who danced between them. In Berlin, the people there were allowed to find solace in the country's one pocket of diversity, a thick, heavy, overflowing pocket which at first caught Ed off-guard but then sobered him too.</p><p>There was a woman - Claire Waldoff - whose recordings were played over the radios in the Berlin bars. The men and women would sing along with Ms. Waldoff, their drinks slushing out onto the chipped floorboards, the bartenders bending over the bar to sing in their customers faces. Alfons knew the songs too, and he slung an arm over Ed's shoulders and whisper-sang the lyrics into his ear, and then a Roma woman wrapped an arm around Ed's waist and fiddled with his mechanical hand. He'd at first thought she was trying to find a wallet, some marks, but when the song ended and Ed looked down, her real, fleshy fingers were curled into his rubbery ones. When she noticed his hand wasn't real, she kissed his fake knuckles and danced away from him. Ed had felt guilty for thinking she would steal, and he felt anger that the words of the men outside the New Town Hall had seeped subconsciously into his thoughts. What other hatreds could they ensconce in him? As he’d looked on at Alfons, blonde hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, he wondered if the uprising could throw mud over that image too.</p><p>Munich's sky was punctured by spires and ghosted by the black smog of automobile exhaust. Once Ed made it past the fountain outside the New Town Hall, a large octagonal shape with coins shimmering at the bottom, he turned left to hide in the building's darkened shadow. The New Town Hall was gleaming, a building meant for government postings, but sometimes the men who listened to angry vitriol in between pints of beer would go to there and request that city officials listen to their recanting of the hate they’d played audience to. How could they string together a coherent sentence for Germany's governing body, Ed thought, if they were drunk when a less than coherent man spoke nonsense to them in the first place?</p><p>Maybe Ed couldn't judge, though. Maybe it was all coherent. He had refused Maes Hughes's invitations every time he extended them and so had never heard the teachings himself. He had even urged Alfons to refuse as well. Although Alfons didn't need much convincing, as he frequented the bars in fair and fun Berlin, three hours by train ride but Alfons always had a place to stay the night so he would never be stranded. Alfons’s allegiances were not to the men with red stains on their arms.</p><p>It was always then, as Ed walked into the cool, deeply black shadow of the New Town Hall, that his mind wandered to Alphonse. There was a beer hall on the outer rim of the Marienplatz. At night it was for the men and their red, white, and black patches, but during the day it was for day drinkers and young men who were stuck in Munich, Germany but who belonged to another, more colorful reality. Ed took a seat at the bar, the stool squeaking under his weight, and waited for the bartender, Dr. Muller, to serve him his staple of wheat beer. Dr. Muller was a doctor of sociology, although he'd been let go by the university in the direct aftermath of the World War, when Germany had fallen quite hard to its knees. While not a sympathizer with the Munich German's current woes, Dr. Muller sometimes worked the overnight shifts, and he'd been privy to a number of the group's drunken gatherings. He gossiped to Ed about it, when Ed got good and red-faced.</p><p>If asked, Ed would admit this beer hall was his<em> lieblingslokal</em> as Alfons so put it. "You're there so often, Ed," Alfons said, smile stretching his neat face, "that if I were anyone else, I'd think you lived there."</p><p>“How’re we feeling tonight, kid?” Dr. Muller asked in accented German. Ed was still getting the hang of the language even a few years after appearing in Germany, and Dr. Muller had spent most of his life on Dutch. He was from a place called the Netherlands. He’d commented on Ed’s accent once or twice, but Ed never had such a punctuated explanation for him. He couldn’t explain to Dr. Muller that his accent was a combination of Amestris’ language and German, which sounded similar when spoken side-by-side, but Amestrian was more fluid where German was pretty stop-and-go. Ed sometimes rolled his words together and it didn’t quite fit the same in German. Every now and then, he’d accidentally say something in Amestrian.</p><p><em>How’re we feeling tonight?</em> was Dr. Muller for, “How many pints should I have ready?” Ed put up three fingers, and Dr. Muller filled three pints. Halfway through the first one, Ed let his mind travel far, far away to Amestris. It was when his nerves were numbed by alcohol that he could really close his eyes and see; the grass outside Granny’s, greener than anything he’d seen in Germany, deeper, brushing his legs like fingertips. He smelled the manure of the countryside, tasted the sulfur of a transmutation, felt the heat of alchemic flames as they burned along his skin, carving trails into his body.</p><p>Of everything Ed saw, it was Alphonse that tethered him there. It wasn't like Ed had lost hope, but he would be lying if he said he never did. At least temporarily, Ed would fumble in his own resolution. The ground beneath him - Germany's ground, not his home's - could be a dream for all he knew. A very vivid, sensory-filled dream. Sometimes, he wished it were a dream so he could explain it away.</p><p>So he could wake up.</p><p>Oftentimes, Ed wondered what Alphonse was doing with his time. If he survived — if Ed had succeeded — was Al living a full life, free of the terrors that had plagued him years previous? Was Ed’s sacrifice worth anything? Deep down he knew it was, and it always would be, and he would never regret it even if it had brought Al nothing. Even if Al had died anyway, having tried was not a waste to Edward. But he did think, and his mind did carry him there: back to Resembool, back to Amestris, back to the rolling green and the cow shit stuck to his boots and the sunlight glinting off steel automail, traveling along the horizon. That was not what Ed had here, but he hoped it was what Alphonse had.</p><p>Taking a gulp of wheat beer, Ed addressed Dr. Muller directly. “Do you have any family out here, Dr. Muller?” Dr. Muller only threw a glance over his shoulder. He was cleaning glasses over a barrel sink, the smell of soap wafting from there to where Ed sat. “Not here, no.” He said.</p><p>Ed frowned. Was Munich a place for those who had been orphaned by their families? Was it a place where people traded their lives for anger? That’s what it seemed like, though he knew Alfons would feel differently. He was always trying to explain away Munich’s strangeness, it’s cloud of intolerance. It wasn’t because Alfonse agreed with any of it, but because he was too kind (and maybe a bit too naive, Ed thought) to vilify all of Munich for its flood of misplaced anger. He was a lot like Al in that way.</p><p>“What about you?” Dr. Muller asked. He looked at Ed, eyes downcast, lashes brushing the tops of his cheeks. He really did have long lashes, this Dr. Muller. “Do you have family in Munich?” He asked the question to find his patron out; to glean from him why he would come to this particular bar as often as he did. Ed had nothing to say. There was no explanation he could give that would satisfy Dr. Muller, because there was no variation of the truth that wouldn't land Ed in a psychiatric hospital. <em>I transmuted myself in order to save my brother. I don’t know if he’s alive. I drink to find out.</em></p><p>“No,” Ed said. He drank some more, now on his second pint. He’d built a tolerance to this wheat beer, and by the time he finished his third he was never drunk so much as comfortably buzzing. He would blink slower, look at the world as though he were underwater. It wasn’t an adverse feeling, but Alfons would sometimes admonish him for it. And Ed would call him Al, and Alfons would correct him. “I’m not Al, Ed.” But Ed would insist. He would insist because how could he not? Alfons was his brother and not his brother at the same time and Ed often wondered if he had been Alfons’s brother in this reality too. If Munich-born Ed was even an Ed or a variation of Ed like Alfons was a variant of Alphonse. Were they brothers? Did they share the same blood? Ed had never conjured up the courage to ask, but sitting in the bar, quiet except for Dr. Muller and his sink and his dishes, Ed wanted the wheat beer to speak the truths into him. He wanted to see in the amber yellow what his mind couldn’t see when he was sober.</p><p>Alphonse, in Alfons’s face. The gentle smile. The eyes that were different colors but that had hidden mysteries within him, entire histories tucked away into two neat irises ringed by blue or honey gold.</p><p>And then the guilt would settle in. Like a ghost, it would melt into Ed’s form. Alfons was Alfons. Wasn’t he? Alfons was Alfons.</p><p>The last pint went away with a cool bite. He could see the sun set behind the spires from where he sat at the bar. He only needed to throw his head back to know it was getting late, the men with moustaches would be out soon, and he needed his Alfons fix before the alcohol wore off. Ed promised himself a long time ago that he wouldn’t let the pressure of this world separate him from his humanity. Whatever humanity meant here he knew it was something he needed to hold onto. Back in Amestris, his tether was Al. In Munich, it’s Alfons. His brothers, perhaps not the both of them. Or maybe they were if he wanted it bad enough.</p>
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